Beware if you are using a Facebook fan gate strategy because as of November 5th, this will be against Facebook’s policy. Many are not shocked by this change as Facebook frowns upon anything that is “forced” on users.

Here’s what a portion of the developers blog post said:

You must not incentivize people to use social plugins or to like a Page. This includes offering rewards, or gating apps or app content based on whether or not a person has liked a Page. It remains acceptable to incentivize people to login to your app, checkin at a place or enter a promotion on your app’s Page. To ensure quality connections and help businesses reach the people who matter to them, we want people to like Pages because they want to connect and hear from the business, not because of artificial incentives. We believe this update will benefit people and advertisers alike.

What Is A Fan Gate?

Fan gates have become a very popular and very effective marketing strategy. Basically, a visitor has to perform a desired action that is usually beneficial to a Facebook Page owner to receive something in return. It’s a fair trade.

Here are some examples:

• Like my page and you can enter to win a free trip to Hawaii
• Share my page to win this amazing free gift (like an Ipad)

This is hugely popular in gaming apps where players can get more points if they share their [widely annoying] updates about the game…we’ve all seem them, I am sure!

What happens is the App, Facebook Page, Marketer (whoever owns the fan gate) gains huge exposure because people are liking their stuff all over the place only because they are incentivized to do so.

Likes, shares, and comments are very social and Facebook rewards social actions.  When a person likes something, you better believe Facebook is helping to spread the word.

So in this lies a huge issue for Facebook.  Facebook hates anything that is unnatural or forced. Players of a game really don’t want to share the game with others…they just want to play the game for the most part.

This leads to another issue. Once the page owner gets the likes, now they could legitimately market ads to those people who liked the page. This might eventually lead to unhappy Facebook users because they will then be seeing ads they are probably not to interested in. Facebook doesn’t like that either.

In terms of marketing and the Facebook user experience, this is good news!! Here’s why…

This Change Levels The Playing Field

Applying the fan gate strategy is not for the average Facebook user, nor for the weak. You need to know some savvy Facebook App developer skills usually paired with some kind of front end (and sometimes pricey) technology that is able to connect fancy iframes and graphics to a Facebook App.  Eeeek – this is very scary to people unaware of how the heck this actually works.

In essence, while this might suck for marketers who have nifty fan gates put in place to get massive likes and exposure, it levels the playing field for all marketers again. This means that marketers will have to go back to the old fashioned, good ol’ VALID marketing techniques to get more fans to their pages and other web properties.

Anything that seems too easy is probably a loophole that won’t last too long. Remember scraping UIDs (User IDs) and being able to literally steal Facebook user  information from pages and groups that you didn’t own and to market to them with ads? Remember how now that is completely against Facebook’s terms? Ahhh, the good ol’ days.  They are long gone! Short term.

Just remember, if a strategy seems too easy, it probably won’t last too long. Liking a page to get a chance to win $100 or an Ipad is fake and artificial. For the most part, people are just liking the page to win – they are not genuinely liking it….and Facebook does not want to reward that anymore!

Good News – Here’s What You Still Can Do

Now that the playing field will be leveled on Nov 5th, marketers will still be able to use squeeze pages or pages that will capture an email address in exchange for that same gift they were using with the like gates, or fan gates. Getting a like will essentially be a two step process. First you will collect the email address (which some might argue is a better strategy) and then you would request the user to like your page so they can be connected with you in other ways besides email.

In the long run, this is a much better strategy because you will actually get people who are serious about your offers as opposed to being practically forced to like something they might not even want to like in the first place.

Let’s Hear From You

=> What do you think about the change? Will you miss the fan gates or are you happy Facebook is leveling the playing field?